Unstill Life by Philip Alcabes
Early morning in early spring. The voice of an owl sounds from above me, somewhere to the right of the path. I can make out its shape near the top of a tree, outlined in the half-light against the grey sky, restive. Forty feet up, possibly fifty. I sense as much as see its head swiveling slowly around and down, as if on gimbals. Lining me up. Now I can make out the eyes. We gaze at one another. It is perched on its branch, then it is slicing through the air very near my head. A gust of gases passes me; a dust of down settles around me.
“What the...?,” I stammer, staggering back.
Now the owl is on a branch a few feet away.
“Did I startle you?,” it asks. “Sorry, if so. It isn’t simple... let’s see... I can tell you that I’m usually shy. But I had a dream yesterday, and it seems to have stayed with me. In the dream, I had turned into a human. A young man. I was flying through the woods, rather low to the ground, sometimes in fact walking rather than flying, going back and forth, actually, between on-the-ground walking and low-to-the-ground flying. I came to another man, a much, much larger one, who was wearing brown boots and a dark-red baseball cap. He was trudging, dropping his feet very heavily, left, right, left, but with real purpose, you know?, as if he needed the earth to feel him walking. He saw me walking or flying, whichever, and said something about my feathers, which apparently I hadn’t lost even though in the dream I was definitely a human, featherless, like you are. And then he took a swing at me with his right arm. His claw—hand, I guess you call it—was bunched up. He would have hit me, too, and it would have hurt, but I was too far off for him. I turned my head back to look at him. He seemed angry. Furious. The whites of his eyes were rimmed with red and the edges of his mouth turned down even as he opened his mouth to yell at me, and I started to fly away, but then an owl appeared in a branch in front of me, and I could see that this owl was my mother’s father. Now, I was born ten springs ago, and my mother is long dead, and I never met her father although of course she spoke of him, so—how did I know that this was my mother’s father in the tree? Anyway, I knew, because in dreams you know things without knowing why. It’s the simultaneity. I settled on the branch next to him.
“This owl in the dream, my mother’s father, didn’t seem to notice that I was a human. But he told me that he had once been a human himself, he thought it had happened in a dream but back in the day—that was the phrase he used for the time when he was young—fewer distinctions were made between dreamlife and waking life than creatures make now. That made me think that he did notice that I was a human, but he was so intimate and grandfatherly in the way he spoke to me in the dream that I couldn’t be sure.”
I woke from this dream at that point. As the day went on, the dream’s particular slant of light through the branches, the iridescence of the dorsal feathers, the timbre of his voice—all the animating simultaneity of the dream disappeared, as always happens, but the breathlessness of that moment when the air had washed over me like a wave breaking and the owl, not a distinct bird at that point but a blur of feathered lifeforce, had surged past my head—that remained. All that day my lungs wouldn’t fill completely and my eyes wouldn’t focus. The symptoms faded gradually.
That night, I dreamt that I lived in a tree. With my preternaturally keen hearing, every rustling leaf on the ground beneath registered in my earholes: each krinch and scrunch, every shivery trill. But it was peaceful up there, and I could see the world in a different way, eye-level with the birds as I was. The crown of a pileated woodpecker working at a nearby oak shone gloriously scarlet; its beak was a blur. The beauty of un-still life, everything all at once.
My uncle came to me then. He had died fifteen or so years ago, but he has come to me in dreams now and then, so I wasn’t surprised to see him. He was an owl now. He was wearing the horn-rimmed eyeglasses that I remember on him when I was a boy, and also the flat cap, the sort that taxi drivers wear in old movies, a cap that I never actually saw on my uncle but which his father, my grandfather, did wear, battered and faded, its original color a phantom now. He put his arm around me—although he was an owl, so it must have been a wing—and told me that I will be okay so long as I remember that life is a single moment of astonishing and beautiful simultaneity, and don’t expect it to be simple, don’t expect it to be still. Then he left.
Early morning, a few days later, on my way to the bus stop, I see the man with the red cap and brown boots. I watch him as if from above. His dog is lunging toward a horned owl, barely visible against the pewter light filtering through the branches of a tree across the street. The dog barks furiously, challenging the man’s hold on his leash. The owl isn’t frightened; the man is. “It’s an owl,” I call to the man. “An owl. You’ll be okay.”
Artist’s Statement
Philip Alcabes has been a biochemistry researcher, schoolteacher, blood-bank delivery driver, political protest organizer, professor, pig and chicken feeder, biostatistician, and essayist. He is a bird watcher. He is ever attentive to detail when in the woods, because he has had Lyme disease twice and is afraid of bears, dragons, and poison ivy.
Philip Alcabes is a writer and teacher. His creative nonfiction and expository essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Arrowsmith Journal, Consequence Magazine, VQR, and other publications. This is his first piece of flash fiction. Alcabes is Emeritus Professor of Public Health at Hunter College in New York City. Alcabes lives in the Bronx, New York. This is his first flash fiction.